The League of Gentlemen actors, from left: Reece Shearsmith as Edward, Mark Gatiss as Chinnery and Steve Pemberton as Tubbs.
Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Mark Gatiss hopes to bring his dark comedy The League of Gentlemen back to TV screens, with Brexit providing the perfect excuse to revive the gruesomely insular characters of Royston Vasey.

Speaking on BBC Radio 6 Music, the Sherlock and Doctor Who writer said he had talked to his co-creators about bringing back the show after more than a decade.

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“We’re hoping to [do it again] … We’ve talked seriously about doing something. We’re not quite sure what it is yet but we’d love to do something, it is 10 years,” he said.

Referring to the show’s “local shop for local people”, run by Edward and Tulip “Tubbs” Tattsyrup, Gatiss said: “I think increasingly, talking about prescience, we have become a local country for local people and I wonder if there is something Brexity in us that we can do.

“Michael Gove’s resemblance to Edward from the local shop is not a coincidence.”

Gatiss said he was sometimes approached by teenagers who would have been too young to watch the original series in the late 90s, but who had become “freshly minted” fans through avenues such as YouTube.

He said he was unsure whether a new show would feature similar characters, or whether the national mood would be better suited to new creations.

The League of Gentleman started as an on-stage sketch act starring Gatiss alongside Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, and co-writer Jeremy Dyson. The quartet subsequently made it into a series for Radio 4, before turning it into a TV series, which aired on BBC2 between 1999 and 2002, winning a Bafta for best comedy 2000. It was followed by a film in 2005, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse.

Gatiss has made numerous TV appearances in recent years, with small roles in Wolf Hall and Game of Thrones.